it’s almost two months ago that I announced to write “once in a
month”. Now finally here is the second newsletter about Lino!

One reason for being late is that something important has happened:
Lino found a second core developer. Hamza from Tunisia started to
contribute in september as a freelancer.

Hamza

It is exactly one month ago that I got a first e-mail from Hamza, a 28
years old Python developer living in Tunis who had seen my job offer. He has more than 3
years of experience as an Odoo/OpenERP developer and wanted “to join a
team around an innovative project” and to improve his skills “with a
new knowledge, especially in building a new project unlike Odoo where
I have to work with their framework.”

I don’t want to leave unnoticed that about one week before this,
during a car drive to Tallinn with my whole family, after having
analyzed Lino’s situation with my wife and recognized the need of
finding an assistant, she asked “Did you pray for it?” I was
surprised to discover that indeed I had never seriously bothered God
with such minor problems of my little human projects. We closed our
business analysis with a prayer song at 90 Km/h on the road between
Pärnu and Tallinn. Believe it or not.

It became quickly evident that Hamza is the person Lino was waiting
for. While until now I had been dealing with people whose primary
motivation was to learn Python, this guy probably knows Python
better than me. Lack of documentation is not a problem for him
because he understands my code. His experience with the Odoo
framework is visible. He is talented, open-minded and quickly learning.

Note that I also love to explain Lino to people with less experience
who are learning Lino on their individual rhythm. I continue to offer
free mentorship to everybody who wants it.

Noi

Lino Noi turned out to be an important tool for Hamza and me.
Noi’s first and most visible benefit is to be a central repository for
our tickets at http://bugs.lino-framework.org/. But something even
more important happens behind the public interface: it helps us to
keep track of our working hours.

Some people don’t understand this. For me it has always been both
fascinating and important to keep track of my working hours. I love
to be able to say e.g. that during the last week I have been working X
hours on project A, Y hours on project B and Y hours on project C.
Some people refuse to even try to transparently report what they are
doing during their day. It is indeed not easy. One of the challenges
is to classify your work. But I believe that working hours are
measurable and that it does make sense. That’s why I wanted more
than just a ticketing system.

I was almost surprised when Hamza understood me and confirmed this.
Thanks to Lino Noi I can see how much Hamza is working, I can verify
that Hamza writes realistic invoices. And Hamza can see how much I am
working. I am not paranoid, but it is good to have an infrastructure
which sustains mutual trust.

Two days ago I received another beautiful confirmation that my vision
is at least not completely foolish. The first end-users started to use
Lino Noi for reporting their problems directly into our database
instead of sending me e-mails. And one of them wrote:

I like your program very much. It might even help us to manage the
social projects (define milestones, create tasks or assign them to
a colleague, write reports, …) with the possibility for all
implied actors to consult them.

This was so beautiful because it does not only confirm Lino Noi as a
ticketing system. It also confirms one of Lino’s central features
which postulates that reusable plugins should seamlessly integrate
into very different applications.

I ♥ Lino

Here you can see me testing an early prototype of the “I ♥ Lino” mug:

I plan to distribute a dozen of these mugs to Lino Welfare users in
Eupen and Châtelet whose destiny is to use Lino for their daily work.
I am not a fanatic of publicity because I believe that good things
grow automatically, and because salesmen sometimes exaggerate positive
aspects and neglect negative aspects of their product. But when
working with these users, I hear that message “I love Lino” almost
every day in many different wordings. It is the kind of message which
reminded me Jesus’ words “if these were silent, the very stones would
cry out.”

And it is true: Lin Welfare is a usable product for Belgian PCSWs
which has grown out it’s child diseases and is ready to be deployed
to new customers. It is absolutely free software released under the
AGPL. There is just some commercial and political stuff to handle.

These mugs are a sign of another revolution in Lino’s lifecycle which
is happening right now: we always knew that Lino needs a team of
professional developers (and thus more users to pay them) if we want
it to survive my inevitable passing away in some hopefully far future.
It took me some time to realize that I cannot expect others to build
that team of professional developers, that I must do this task myself.
That decision was not easy because it implied that I must stop saying
“Just let me code” and start taking my responsibility as an entrepreneur.

So Hamza and Lino Noi are only beginnings. I’ll do my best to cope
with all this. Hope with me!